Yearly Archives: 2016

Everybody knows that smartphones have had a profound effect on daily life. They've made it much more simple and efficient to complete many different tasks, and they act as a single source for finding all sorts of information needed on a day-to-day basis.

But perhaps no sector of life has changed more due to the smartphone than commerce. While businesses in both B2B and B2C spheres have been competing for mobile visibility for years, a new study from Google is finally beginning to quantify exactly how smartphone users accomplish tasks with their devices - and how businesses stand to gain from focusing on mobile.

As of December 2015, Facebook had 1.59 billion monthly active users, with millions more using the standalone Messenger app. When it comes to raw user numbers, no other network or messaging app comes close.

However, these numbers do not necessarily reflect users' feelings about a product. Users' enjoyment and perception of importance, as well as popularity among specific demographics, are not reflected in overall user number stats. So while Facebook may be the go-to social option for marketers playing the numbers game, there's a different service that should be focused on to reach the hearts of young people: Snapchat.

Anybody involved with Internet marketing - and especially search engine marketing - has likely heard the news that Google will no longer be displaying text ads in the right sidebar of search engine results. Instead, four text ads (previously three) will be displayed at the top of a search results page, while positions 5 through 7 will be pushed to the bottom.

This change is rightly causing quite a bit of confusion and apprehension, as it's thought that fewer ad positions per page will drive up AdWords bids and increase competition. Here are some of the most important takeaways from this rollout.

When Google's Penguin algorithm first went live nearly four years ago, sites that were engaging in black hat link schemes saw massive reductions in search rank and traffic that ended up being very difficult to recover from. At it's best, Penguin helped even the playing field by penalizing sites that were gaming the system through dubious link building. Unfortunately, it also killed some sites whose webmasters were unaware they were doing anything wrong or unethical.

Now, a new and potentially final Penguin update could be on its way. Analyzing your backlink profile can help ensure your rankings don't plummet.

In December of 2013, the Federal Trade Commission began investigating what was then a burgeoning content marketing strategy - native advertising. The investigation sought to answer many questions, but perhaps most pressingly, the FTC wanted to know if typical readers truly understand when they're being presented with paid content, what "paid content" means, and the ethics of essentially disguising promotional content as editorial.

Over two years later - now that native advertising is incredibly popular - the FTC has finally released guidelines for publishers, and they could end up changing how many advertisers approach this strategy.